ALSA Error and No Boss 2 After 8.3.8 Upgrade

[kenship]

Hi,

I did a straight upgrade and noticed the following:

1. Unit display shows "No Boss 2"

2. Error message when trying to play music
"Failed to open "ALSA Default" (alsa); Failed to open ALSA device "_audioout": Invalid argument"

Did I do something wrong or miss anything during upgrade?

Kenneth

[kenship]

New information:

After unplugging power from unit now I'm not able to start at all. Not sure if Boss 2 is working or not.

Kenneth

[Tim Curtis]

What version did you upgrade from?

It's been discussed many times here but Allo stopped supporting their products and software several years ago and some of their drivers are broken in 6.1.x Linux kernels < 6.1.35. Just by luck the Pi kernel devs fixed the Boss and Katana drivers starting with 6.1.35 but there is no guarantee they will be fixed in the future if for some reason they don't work.

Note moOde switched to kernel 6.1.21 in release 8.3.1 almost a year ago and the driver breakage was noted in the 8.3.2 release notes.

Code:

################################################################################
#
# 2023-04-21 moOde 8.3.2 (Bullseye)
#
################################################################################

Audio devices

- NOTE: Allo Boss 2 I2S driver not working on new 6.1.y kernel branch

You could try to upgrade the kernel to latest (which will be > 6.1.35) and thus will contain the driver fix. This is untested and so YMMV

Code:

sudo rpi-update

Our TBD Bookworm release will be based on latest Pi kernel and so will also contain the newer boss2 and katana drivers.

[kenship]

What version did you upgrade from?

It's been discussed many times here but Allo stopped supporting their products and software several years ago and some of their drivers are broken in 6.1.x Linux kernels < 6.1.35. Just by luck the Pi kernel devs fixed the Boss and Katana drivers starting with 6.1.35 but there is no guarantee they will be fixed in the future if for some reason they don't work.

Note moOde switched to kernel 6.1.21 in release 8.3.1 almost a year ago and the driver breakage was noted in the 8.3.2 release notes.

Code:

################################################################################
#
# 2023-04-21 moOde 8.3.2 (Bullseye)
#
################################################################################

Audio devices

- NOTE: Allo Boss 2 I2S driver not working on new 6.1.y kernel branch

You could try to upgrade the kernel to latest (which will be > 6.1.35) and thus will contain the driver fix. This is untested and so YMMV

Code:

sudo rpi-update

Our TBD Bookworm release will be based on latest Pi kernel and so will also contain the newer boss2 and katana drivers.

[kenship]

I eventually installed a clean version of 8.3.8 and got it working.

While installing the kernel update to fix Boss 2 I hit an error related to VideoCore libraries and the Boss 2 display went out after.

Still able to play music but OLED doesn't show anything except for a brief moment at start up.

Is there any package I can install? I tried the OLED patch but Python version isn't compatible.

Thanks.

Log is here: 


*** Downloading specific firmware revision (this will take a few minutes)                                                    
 % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current                                                
                                Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed                                                  
 0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0                                                
100  142M    0  142M    0     0  5208k      0 --:--:--  0:00:27 --:--:-- 5469k                                                
*** Updating firmware                                                                                                        
*** Updating kernel modules                                                                                                  
*** depmod 6.6.17-v8+                                                                                                        
*** depmod 6.6.17+                                                                                                            
*** depmod 6.6.17-v7l+                                                                                                        
*** depmod 6.6.17-v7+                                                                                                        
*** depmod 6.6.17-v8-16k+                                                                                                    
*** Updating VideoCore libraries                                                                                              
*** Using SoftFP libraries                                                                                                    
cp: cannot stat '//root/.rpi-firmware/vc/softfp/*': No such file or directory


Kenneth

[Tim Curtis]

I see it's bumping to the 6.6 kernel branch. We don't have experience with that branch yet, but it looks like it may also need updated Pi firmware packages?

You could try searching the Forum for a boss 2 thread that references a link to an earlier 6.1.x kernel that has the driver  fixes. I recall one of the pi devs provided the link for testing.